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Sunday, March 3, 2013

The Naughty Nineties (Universal, 1945)

The last two nights Charles and I, at least partly to get
away from the heaviness of Parsifal, had
reopened the 28-film Abbott and Costello boxed set from Universal and picked up
the next two films in sequence. On Friday night we watched The
Naughty Nineties (1945), a pretty close
reworking of Show Boat that
seemed to have existed mainly so Universal could make a movie with their big
comedy stars and also recycle the show boat from their 1929 and 1936 versions
of Universal’s classic musicals and the saloon set they’d built five years
earlier (1940) for the Mae West-W. C. Fields classic My Little
Chickadee. The plot of this one is pretty
simple: Sam Jackson (Henry Travers) is the owner of the River Queen show boat and he has the obligatory pretty daughter,
Caroline Jackson (Lois Collier), who’s his female star. His male star is
vainglorious actor Dexter Broadhurst (Bud Abbott), and he’s putting on clean
shows and doing good business until he’s set upon by three unscrupulous
gamblers who are about to be thrown out of town. The Terrible Trio this time
are Crawford (Alan Curtis, a decent if unexceptional leading man who got a lot
of work from Universal around this time), Bailey (Joe Sawyer) and Bonita Farrow
(Rita Johnson, who’d got a star buildup at MGM in the late 1930’s that hadn’t
taken even though she was quite good, as she is here), and their plot is to get
Captain Jackson into the Gilded Cage saloon and casino, where they will cheat
him out of the River Queen —
which they do by challenging him to a card game and then drugging him so he can
no longer see the cards. (I couldn’t help but joke that instead of playing a guardian angel, this was one movie in which
Travers needed one.) Dexter and
Sebastian Dinwiddie (Lou Costello), who’s a sort of general assistant on the
show boat as well as the drummer in the marching band, manage to get Jackson
out of the casino before he’s lost the show boat altogether, but by the time
they do so Jackson is into the bad guys for $15,000, for which they claim
three-quarters ownership of the River Queen and insist on opening a casino aboard. They do that
and rig the games, and eventually Jackson has had enough when a gamblers’
quarrel on board leads to a gunshot and he complains that his unwanted partners
have turned his nice, clean show boat into a cheap saloon.

Eventually, of
course, Broadhurst and Dinwiddie cotton to what’s going on and save the day;
the gamblers play one last hand with Jackson for total ownership of the boat,
only Crawford — who’s fallen in love with Caroline Jackson — stacks the deck in
Jackson’s favor, he gets his show
boat back, Bailey and Bonita get arrested and everyone presumably lives happily
ever after (though, perhaps due to the Production Code, instead of ending up as
a couple Crawford seems simply to disappear from Caroline’s life — they don’t
get together and they don’t have the tearful farewell one would otherwise
expect). Like a lot of the Abbott and Costello movies, The Naughty
Nineties isn’t much as a film, though it
has a certain period charm, but it lives and dies mainly on the strength of its
gags. In an early scene, Lou Costello is playing a huge bass drum for the River
Queen’s marching band — and he loses track
of the rest of the group and starts marching down the streets alone, still
banging away on his drum. Later he’s supposed to be making a cake in the show
boat’s kitchen but accidentally puts a feather-filled pot holder in as one of
the layers — and when the cake is served in the River Queen’s casino, everyone starts exhaling tiny feathers and
it looks like it’s snowing indoors. The film’s best part is the most complete
version ever recorded of the famous Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First?”
routine — you know, “Who’s on first, What’s on second, I-Don’t-Know’s on third”
— which was added to the film after it was edited and Universal’s executives
got a look at it and decided it wasn’t funny enough. Abbott and Costello had
already been doing this routine, written by John Grant (who got a co-producer
credit on this one — he was also the credited producer of their immediately
previous film, Here Come the Co-Eds),
for almost a decade in burlesque and radio as well as a much shorter version in
their first movie, One Night in the Tropics, and reportedly this routine has become so famous
that a continuous loop of the performance of it in this film runs at the
Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

There are also a couple of gags
ripped off from the Marx Brothers: the “throw me a lifesaver” bit from Horse
Feathers (an anachronism in this film, one
imdb.com contributor pointed out, because this is supposed to be taking place
in the 1890’s and Life Savers candy wasn’t invented until 1912) and the mirror
scene from Duck Soup — which was
actually an old vaudeville routine that before the Marxes got it had previously
been filmed by Charlie Chaplin in The Floorwalker (1916). The Naughty Nineties is a bit derivative, and the Abbott and Costello
routines were starting to bore audiences — which Charles could totally
understand: so many of their gags were based on Abbott getting the better of
Costello we actually heave sighs of relief on the rare occasions their writers were willing to let Costello get
the upper hand! — but it’s charming, well made, quite funny and has a winsome
performance by Lois Collier, who gets two songs, the period piece “On a Sunday
Afternoon” (the film is chock full of actual 1890’s songs, including Al
Jolson’s hit “Ma Blushin’ Rosie,” played as an instrumental by the show boat
band during the scene in which Costello gets lost) and a new song, “I Can’t Get
You Out of My Mind” by Edgar Fairchild (music) and Jack Brooks (lyrics);
imdb.com says she was dubbed but not by whom. The film was written by
committee, and it shows — Edmund L. Hartmann, John Grant, Edmund Joseph, Hal
Fimberg and “additional comedy sequences” by Felix Adler — and directed by the
Boy Named Jean Yarbrough in better form than usual; some of the scenes actually
have visual distinction (though that may be as much due to the great
cinematographer, George Robinson, as to Yarbrough) and the overall atmosphere
is a bit richer than usual for Abbott and Costello.